Ruminations from a jaded old guy

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Simple. There is no national grid that can nor will supply the energy needed to replace the energy currently supplied by hydrocarbons. Not daily, not hourly.

I’ll keep it extremely simple to be comprehensible. To transport the equivalent of hydrocarbon energy content to electricity you need very high capacity 24/7 power plants. You need to have high capacity transport lines in the 1000 kV range which need multiple transformers to step down the energy to the level it won’t blow up your car.

You need the cables, either from aluminum or copper to take up the charge. No national grid has this. So you need to replace the whole infrastructure down to the connection of your domicile to the grid.

The grid needs to be able to compensate for the wildly varying supply now that so called green power plants come on line. Solar doesn’t work at night, wind farms don’t work when there is either to much or to little wind.

But even if they would work 24/7 (current levels are at best 20% of rated capacity in the northern hemisphere) still no city has the infrastructure to cope with a projected demand of 100% EV vehicles, ships, airplanes.

In fact even the very big conglomerates with the most modern infrastructure won’t be able to supply all energy needs including vehicles without melting the transport lines.

On purpose i refrained from introducing the calculations of how much energy is generated using hydrocarbons and how there is noway anyone will be able to replace it by green energy nor realistically transmit it to the end-user.

The problem here is that those who profess this replacement live in large cities, with relatively few EV vehicles and electricity supplied by fossil fuels without realizing that the the rest of the world doesn’t have an infrastructure even capable to keep a refrigerator running without fail let alone charge an EV vehicle.

And don’t get me started on long haul trucks. Only a very small part of the world has flat straight roads with high capacity power lines.

Or transatlantic freight-ships. Where are you going to charge your 200.000 tonnes capacity container-ship? The Panama canal?

President Obama’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris.

Mr. Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority. This is because no serious opinion can be written.

This became clear when White House officials briefed reporters before Mr. Obama’s speech to the nation on Wednesday evening. They said a war against ISIS was justified by Congress’s authorization of force against Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that no new approval was needed.

But the 2001 authorization for the use of military force does not apply here. That resolution — scaled back from what Mr. Bush initially wanted — extended only to nations and organizations that “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the 9/11 attacks.

Not only was ISIS created long after 2001, but Al Qaeda publicly disavowed it earlier this year. It is Al Qaeda’s competitor, not its affiliate.

Mr. Obama may rightly be frustrated by gridlock in Washington, but his assault on the rule of law is a devastating setback for our constitutional order. His refusal even to ask the Justice Department to provide a formal legal pretext for the war on ISIS is astonishing.

It’s been almost two years since that Op-ed was written, and Obama is still carrying out his illegal war on ISIS with barely a peep from our incredibly corrupt and useless Congress. Indeed, the only thing Congress is scheming to do is to ensure the next President receives a blank check for perpetual war.

Sen­ate Ma­jor­ity Lead­er Mitch Mc­Con­nell offered mem­bers a snow-week­end sur­prise late Wed­nes­day night: Quietly tee­ing up a po­ten­tial de­bate on the leg­al un­der­pin­ning for the fight against IS­IS.

After months of wor­ry­ing that such a res­ol­u­tion—known as an au­thor­iz­a­tion for the use of mil­it­ary force—would tie the next pres­id­ent’s hands, Mc­Con­nell’s move to fast-track the meas­ure sur­prised even his top deputy, Sen­ate Ma­jor­ity Whip John Cornyn, who was un­aware that Mc­Con­nell had set up the au­thor­iz­a­tion.

The AUMF put for­ward by Mc­Con­nell would not re­strict the pres­id­ent’s use of ground troops, nor have any lim­its re­lated to time or geo­graphy. Nor would it touch on the is­sue of what to do with the 2001 AUMF, which the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion has used to at­tack IS­IS des­pite that au­thor­iz­a­tion’s in­struc­tions to use force against those who planned the 9/11 ter­ror­ist at­tacks. By con­trast, the leg­al au­thor­ity put for­ward by the ad­min­is­tra­tion last Feb­ru­ary wouldn’t au­thor­ize “en­dur­ing of­fens­ive ground com­bat op­er­a­tions” and would have ended three years after en­act­ment, un­less reau­thor­ized.

Read that over and over and over until you get how incredibly dangerous it is.

The danger obviously is allowing 1 sole person the possibility to give executive orders. It’s no different from a dictatorship. It again proves USA is not a democracy but rather evolving into an Idiocracy. Anyone badmouthing President Putin should look at President Obama. But as the saying goes: Every nation gets the leadership it deserves. Apparently the USA deserves a dictator